TY - JOUR
T1 - Effectiveness of incentives offered by mobile phone app to encourage cycling: A long‐term study
AU - Huang, Bingyuan
AU - Thomas, Tom
AU - Groenewolt, Benjamin
AU - Claasen, Yorick
AU - Berkum, Eric
N1 - Funding Information:
This study is part of the EMPOWER project, which is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The authors thank Johan Koolwaaij at Mobidot for his valuable help with data provision.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. IET Intelligent Transport Systems published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology
PY - 2021/3/1
Y1 - 2021/3/1
N2 - Reduction of car use is one of the most effective ways to tackle congestion-related problems. Using positive incentives to stimulate bicycle use is one possibility to reduce car use. Cycling is a sustainable transport mode that uses little space and is healthy. There is evidence that positive incentives may be more effective than punishing travellers for undesirable behaviour, and the emergence of mobile applications for delivering interventions has opened up new opportunities for influencing travellers. So far, few studies have focused on exploring the effectiveness of positive incentives on long-term behavioural change. We used the SMART app to deliver positive incentives to more than 6000 travellers in the Dutch region of Twente. The app automatically tracks users and provides incentives such as challenges with rewards, feedback, and messages. This study covers the period from March 2017 to June 2018, in which more than 1000 SMART users participated in monthly challenges. We evaluated the effects of the challenges and rewards and found that the challenges did encourage cycling and reduced car use in the short term. There is also some evidence for behavioural change over a longer time period.
AB - Reduction of car use is one of the most effective ways to tackle congestion-related problems. Using positive incentives to stimulate bicycle use is one possibility to reduce car use. Cycling is a sustainable transport mode that uses little space and is healthy. There is evidence that positive incentives may be more effective than punishing travellers for undesirable behaviour, and the emergence of mobile applications for delivering interventions has opened up new opportunities for influencing travellers. So far, few studies have focused on exploring the effectiveness of positive incentives on long-term behavioural change. We used the SMART app to deliver positive incentives to more than 6000 travellers in the Dutch region of Twente. The app automatically tracks users and provides incentives such as challenges with rewards, feedback, and messages. This study covers the period from March 2017 to June 2018, in which more than 1000 SMART users participated in monthly challenges. We evaluated the effects of the challenges and rewards and found that the challenges did encourage cycling and reduced car use in the short term. There is also some evidence for behavioural change over a longer time period.
U2 - 10.1049/itr2.12034
DO - 10.1049/itr2.12034
M3 - Article
SN - 1751-956X
VL - 15
SP - 406
EP - 422
JO - IET Intelligent Transport Systems
JF - IET Intelligent Transport Systems
IS - 3
ER -
